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Thanks to everyone who has commented. And apologies for the ABC software, which delays responses and makes it a little difficult for the back and forth of conversation.

Apologies too for my huge and unaccountable oversight - yes of course, Belvoir and Malthouse are AMPAG companies and were of course counted in the survey Jane Howard and I did.

Hi Stephen - I think the question of what kind of theatre we want to make is absolutely foregrounded. And the answer seems to me to be, "lots of different kinds of theatre". There are plays as we conventionally understand them, and devised pieces as we mostly saw in the MTC's NEON season, and director-led theatre and so on and so forth. And the things artists write about and respond to is just as diverse. Australians are a diverse bunch. What we don't have is a singular kind of theatre that we can point to and say, well, this is Australian. I personally believe that is an excellent thing, that reflects the complexity of what it is to be Australian today.

I guess one of the things at issue here is "Australian content". It seems bizarre to me to think that a new work created by Australian artists is not Australian content: if we just decided Australian content would have to be work that is overtly about Australia, we would have to exclude some of our finest theatre artists, from Tom Holloway to Daniel Schlusser. If, as Stephen Sewell says, Australian content was at 61 per cent in 1996 and then fell, we are, in 2013, getting back to those levels. This seems to me to be encouraging. Also, Australian writers inhabit large stages as well as small: I can think off-hand of Tim Winton, Joanna Murray-Smith, Andrew Bovell and David Williamson all doing high-profile, highly resourced works in the larger theatres.

Hi Josh - I can't see how new Australian works are not being given credibility: what I do see is a new energy in which all sorts of writing and authorship are now invited into the mix. It's not, as I think is very clear, at the expense of writers: it's happening AS WELL AS play-centred theatre. If major companies were not responding to the creative vitality on our independent stages, I would think something were very wrong. The other thing that I couldn't really talk about - because I wasn't writing a book - is that writers are often very much part of these other kinds of collaborations, collectively and individually. It seems to me that it's actually a very exciting time to be a writer in the theatre in Australia, because the question of what writing is in the theatre is now much more open. How is that a bad thing?

And yes, as I think should be clear, I was making a qualitative judgment about writing there. That wasn't the part about facts, which is the middle bit.

Thanks to everyone who has commented. And apologies for the ABC software, which delays responses and makes it a little difficult for the back and forth of conve

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